


Lifebreath

by musamihi



Category: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 19:48:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/601431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musamihi/pseuds/musamihi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Something about Bill has changed, and try as he might not to see it, Jim can't help that he knows.  He's always known.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lifebreath

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Trojie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trojie/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, Troije! This is exactly the prompt I wanted for the OTP that stole my heart last year, so thank you for giving me a chance to roll around in them for a little while! I very much hope you enjoy it.

Jim wondered – as far as he let himself wonder – why he seemed to be the only one who had noticed Bill's new emptiness, his absence of passion. To him it was obvious as the airless desolation after a fireball, the burnt vacuum in the wake of a lightning bolt. If it had ended, as such things usually do, in a terrible, ear-splitting clap, the thunderous reaffirmation of balance, he might not have paid it any mind. Every man had doubts. Every man – even Bill – had his moments of peevish apathy, of lighting a cigarette and pouring out a drink and saying _to hell with it_ for a little while. 

But it persisted, this void; and if there were men who could survive without ardour, without _belief_ , Bill was not among them. He could no more live without his cause than he could without oxygen. When Bill sat beside him in his tidy, dustless living room on that rainy August evening, when they both could see the storm fronts that were Eden and Washington about to crash together with what promised to be a whimper, when Bill just sighed about how _bloody sad_ it was – Jim knew. Either Bill was dead, or Bill had become a lie. Where was the anger, the herculean effort to dominate the last bucking pieces of an empire? Things were not _bloody sad_ to Bill Haydon. Not in private. Not with him. The day Bill found himself in the service of something he could only describe as _bloody sad_ , he would end.

And yet he kept walking about, kept working, kept letting Jim in of an odd Sunday morning, showing no signs of keeling over. So Jim let himself believe, somehow, that Bill had only mellowed, that he'd found some new kind of fuel to go on. It was stupid. It was blind. But it was easier, and easier to believe, than the alternative.

There was one morning – a dreary, misty New Year's Eve – when he almost let himself _think_ it, the mental equivalent of a question muttered in an empty room. He'd come to Bill's with a bottle in a white paper bag, a belated Christmas gift the majority of which he absolutely intended to consume himself. The bag sat crumpled on the table; the bottle was open; his coat was still cool and damp in the hall, and already their two glasses were ready to be refilled, holding nothing but ice slick with the sheen of the first round. Bill was in his dressing gown, his hair sticking every which way, his entire person radiating the warmth of sleep – ever one for a lie-in. He was poured into an armchair, letting the newspaper lie over his knee as though he had some vague ambition in the direction of reading it. Jim was settled on the sofa, his legs stretched out toward the new and struggling fire, his ankle settled comfortably over Bill's slippered foot.

"It's thick as soup out there," Jim said, when the heat had finally thawed him out of his silence. "You open your mouth and it's like swallowing the Thames."

Bill's nose wrinkled. "Filthy thing. I _thought_ you smelled of rot."

Such a small thing; so commonplace; barely more than polite noise. And yet it struck him like a wall of wind.

***

They lay in the grass, years earlier – God, more than thirty – with the river making a dark, still line behind them. The boathouse was a short, black shadow in the distance, and Bill, his elbow wedged into Jim's jacket to keep out of the mud, was a shadow so close Jim could hardly make him out, a darkness leaning over him and blotting out the rest of the world. Bill would shift occasionally, as though he couldn't decide whether he'd rather be looking at Jim or at the sky.

Not that Jim made that observation on his own, of course. Bill was deceptively open in his more imaginative moments. 

"I can never decide," he was drawling, pushing his fingers through Jim's hair and the ragged grass as though they were one entity, "whether I prefer the elegance of concentrated force, or the grandeur of the indescribably vast."

"Do you have to choose?" 

"At the moment, yes."

Jim neglected to offer his input; for him, just now, there was only one choice. There was the sky with all the stars in it, and there was Bill, and while he wasn't so simple as to see the all-encompassing in one man, Bill was expansive. Even – especially – when he wasn't filling a space with his voice, his presence soared into every corner as though his natural state of being was too large for walls, for artificial constructions like buildings or borders. He rested in the infinite, never harbouring a doubt that it was his place, that he belonged everywhere and in everything. It was a condition Jim could never imagine for himself, in spite of all his travels, no matter how much of a facility he felt with the world around him. Bill felt as though he had been born to this, which made it true.

And Jim was content to watch it breathe in him, sometimes.

"It occurred to me just now that this is all rather tedious," Bill said, staring now at the trees that stood between this bank and the field. "I think I might like to take a boat and just go, you know. Anywhere that isn't here."

"You're hungry, that's all." It was amazing what minor jostles could send Bill into fits of triviality. 

"Maybe. But still, I think we could make it pretty damn far. Everywhere that's anywhere opens to this river, and so long as we make it through London, that great Scylla and Charybdis, we could follow it right out to the sea."

"To somewhere that matters."

"Don't be stupid – nowhere matters more than here. To someplace _else_. It'll get us anywhere we like, and don't mistake me, I'm not making some starry-eye paean to Nature. There's nothing in that. It is what it is because we've made it so. I think the same of that _grandeur of the indescribably vast_ , by the way. It was all so much stuff until we mapped onto it what mattered. Which argues heavily in favour of _the elegance of concentrated force_ , naturally."

"Naturally." Jim caught Bill's hand and held it, not pulling it away from where it was half-twisted into his hair, not pressing it closer – just stopping him. There was a small, greedy part of him, something sullen that he hid because he suspected it to be unworthy, that loved to have things all to his own. There was no one else Bill allowed to arrest him in anything – probably he wouldn't even allow Jim, if it came to something serious – but he consented to be held by one man, to tarry for a little while if Jim required it of him. "So," Jim said after a silent moment in which the quiet rush of the river seemed somehow to reassert itself, "where will we go?" 

"Oh, to your rooms, I suppose." Bill planted his hand over Jim's shoulder and pushed himself up. "Lacking anything better, I'll settle for a drink." 

***

_Filthy thing. Rot._

It was nothing. Bill was often frivolous. It meant nothing. At most, Bill had fallen out of love with something he'd amused himself with at Oxford, and Jim rather thought he was glad it was the Thames and not _him_. It was nothing.

"Rot, and damp, and the worst of December," Jim replied, rubbing his hands – still white in places with the cold – uneasily together.

"We'll have it out of you soon enough. You do come prepared." Bill cast the newspaper carelessly against the arm of his chair, leaned forward to seize the bottle, and poured another round. When he glanced up to meet Jim's gaze there was an energy in his eyes, an easy, healthy light that Jim realized in that moment Bill had never been without. And flatter himself as he might, Jim could never believe that he, that any one man, could be enough to keep the fire lit in Bill Haydon. So Bill was still in love with something, something more than Jim, as he must always be to keep himself alive.

Jim couldn't have said what it was, but he knew what it _wasn't_. It wasn't the work. It wasn't England. 

But he said nothing; he hardly let himself think anything. He escaped to the dark, familiar kernel of greed inside of him, the shameful core that so revelled in keeping Bill, and he made himself forget the rest. They were both breathing, after all, and Jim was not Bill – Jim had never wanted or thought he was owed everything. This little sitting room would do for him, and this bottle of scotch, and this brush of fingers against the back of his hand, and this promise of more that always radiated off of Bill's sudden edge of a smile.

And whatever other infinite Bill had found to keep himself in that all-essential rapture – well, let it keep the rest of Bill. 

They were both breathing. Jim had what he wanted.


End file.
